Shadows Still Remain

by Peter de Jonge

  “Your mother doesn’t have your cell number?” asks Loomis.

  “Written it down twenty places and can’t find any of them,” says O’Hara.

  “Really?” says Krekorian.

  Although O’Hara’s heart has been abruptly jolted to full speed, she feigns the depressed torpor she felt a minute before. Slowly and haphazardly, she gathers her coat and belongings and trudges out of the room. With the same underwater gait, she walks down the stairs and crosses the street to her car, where she stares up at the skinny window of the detective room and waits for her phone to ring.

  29

  The following evening, at ten minutes before midnight, O’Hara gets buzzed into a limestone town house on Forty-ninth just east of Third and rides an open cage elevator to the top. Richard Mayer, wearing a cashmere blazer and pressed old-guy jeans, waits in the barely lit marble foyer of the penthouse, and as he guides O’Hara through a series of just as dark rooms, she wonders if Mayer is going for atmosphere or saving on his Con Ed bill. Mayer leads O’Hara into a small den. There’s just enough light for O’Hara to see that the man sunk in the corner of the couch, looking old, frail and busted, or roughly the opposite of how he looks on camera, is Henry Stubbs, coanchor of CBS’s local evening news. “Detective,” says Mayer. “This is Hank Stubbs.”

  “I see that,” says O’Hara, as Stubbs sinks deeper into the furniture.

  “The reason we’re here,” says Mayer, “is that eight months ago Hank went on a date with Francesca Pena arranged through an escort service called Aphrodite.”

  Mayer hands O’Hara an American Express receipt dated April 9, 2005, along with a stamped passport, airline tickets and a bill from the Convent Garden Hotel, all of which put Stubbs in London over the long Thanksgiving weekend that Pena was murdered. To call O’Hara a fan of Stubbs is an exaggeration, but he is certainly the only weekend anchor whose smarminess quotient is low enough for her to stomach, and sometimes she catches the show after Bruno’s walk. She would have guessed forty-eight. The passport says sixty-one, and even in shadow, he looks all of it.

  “Just one date?” O’Hara asks Stubbs.

  “Correct,” Mayer answers for him.

  “You didn’t like her?” asks O’Hara, this time twisting in her chair to face Stubbs front on.

  “I liked her a lot,” says Stubbs. “I asked for her again but was told she had left the agency.”

  “Three thousand dollars,” says O’Hara, glancing at the Amex receipt. “What do you get for that?”

  “Good question,” says Stubbs, his anchorman baritone diminished beyond recognition.

  “I mean, how much time?”

  “Two hours.”

  “Fifteen hundred an hour, and you wanted an encore. Must have been pretty special.”

  Stubbs’s attempt at a smile comes out a grimace.

  “I think we’ve accomplished everything we can this evening, Detective,” says Mayer, leaning forward and bringing his hands to the knees of his expensive jeans. “I don’t have to remind you that my client has reached out voluntarily at enormous personal risk. His information deserves to be treated with the utmost discretion.”

  Puh-lease, thinks O’Hara. With Pena’s stripping front-page news, Mayer and Stubbs figure her call girl past can’t be far behind. This is nothing but a calculated gamble to save Stubbs’s high-paid celebrity gig. Under different circumstances, O’Hara would chew Mayer a new asshole on the spot, but luckily for Mayer, discretion suits the suspended O’Hara as much as Stubbs. “I appreciate that,” she says.

  An hour later, O’Hara is back downtown in the Seven, albeit in a highly unfamiliar part, sharing a table with her partner in the second-floor lounge of the recently opened Rivington Hotel. The corner table looks out across Rivington at the antique signage for Economy Candy. Below them, even at one in the morning, the street is jammed, the only thing moving the ratted-out bikes of the delivery guys, greasy takeout dangling from the handlebars. The hotel lounge is exactly the kind of high-end spot no self-respecting cop would ever set foot in, which is why Krekorian chose it.

  There don’t seem to be any waitresses, so O’Hara gets up and heads to the bar, passing a full-size pool table beneath an elaborate plastic chandelier. Playing eight ball at dive bars is one of O’Hara’s preferred activities, so she can’t help noticing that the table is both empty and free, with no slots for quarters by the ball return. Then again there are no balls or cue sticks either. Just as curious is the small library of books set out for guests at the end of the bar. Weary travelers wanting to thumb through something while they drink have four titles from which to choose: The Photography of Atget, The Earth Sculptures of Robert Smithson, a memoir by Paul Bowles and a mini-biography of the emperor Hadrian. O’Hara hasn’t heard of any of them, although God knows Lowry probably has: the only thing missing is a coffee-table book on the lost art of sutlery.

  “Single malt,” says O’Hara when she finally gets back to their table with the drinks. “We’re drinking expensive tonight.”

  “Celebrating your suspension?”

  “No, you coming here.”

  “Why you doing this, Dar? Everyone knows you’re the best detective in the Seven. It’s just a matter of time before you make grade.”

  “I think it’s about the expression on Lowry’s face.”

  “You’re crazy.”

  “Borderline,” says O’Hara, clinking his glass. “But you’re not. And you came anyway. It means a lot.”

  “No thanks needed, Dar.”

  O’Hara tells her partner about the visit to Mayer’s town house. “A stripper and a hooker,” says K., nursing his aged scotch. “This girl must be your new hero.”

  “There are worse things a person can do.”

  “Saint Darlene O’Hara, patron saint of sex workers. I guess you want me to track down that credit card payment.”

  “That would be lovely, Serge.” O’Hara glances back across the street at the sign for Economy Candy. It looks convincing, but for all she knows it could be a facade thrown up by developers to give hotel guests a more textured urban view, as purely decorative as the pool table nobody plays on and the books nobody reads. “So K., how the fuck do you even know about this place?”

  “Everyone has a dark side, Dar.”

  “Oh, that’s right, I remember. You went to college.”

  30

  On a prime retail stretch of Ludlow, just south of Stanton, eeL displays a bicycle in the window. The small store, however, is not a bike shop, and except for that one prominently displayed BMX model, favored by twelve-year-olds in the projects and thirty-five-year-olds downtown, sells nothing else bike related.

  Then again eeL sells very little of anything. As far as O’Hara can tell, its entire inventory is half a dozen T-shirts and sweatshirts, many adorned with the same camouflage pattern; two styles of jeans; and a shelf of Japanese fashion magazines. O’Hara has noticed other boutiques in the Seven selling merchandise just as piddling and random, but now that Krekorian has traced Stubbs’s three-thousand-dollar credit card payment to here, O’Hara knows how at least one of them stays in business.

  The owner of eeL is listed as Evelyn Lee, thirty-two, of State Street, Brooklyn, and an Asian woman of approximately that age sits behind the counter.

  “Great stuff,” says O’Hara after stretching out her perusal of the store as long as possible. “Beautifully edited.”

  “Thanks,” says the woman, smiling over her laptop. “Let me know if you need any help.”

  “Actually,” says O’Hara, “I’m looking for the owner: Evelyn Lee.”

  The mention of Lee, which occurs to O’Hara is eeL backward, erases the smile from the woman’s face and sends her English into a nosedive. “She not here on Fridays,” she says, snapping her Mac shut.

  “Any idea when she will be?”

  “Never here,” says the woman, shaking her head discouragingly. “Sorry, English no good.”

  “But you can read this,” says O’Ha
ra, picking up the library copy of Prep lying open beside the register. “Impressive.”

  “Who you?”

  “Who me? Me NYPD. Who you?” Rather than waiting for a reply, O’Hara reaches for the python slouch bag hanging from the back of the woman’s chair, and removes the purse. “E. Lee,” she reads off the license.

  “Me Eva, not Evelyn. Lee common name in Korea.”

  “So I hear,” says O’Hara, still staring at the license. “The Lee I’m looking for is also thirty-two and also lives on State Street, Brooklyn. Thanksgiving morning, a nineteen-year-old girl named Francesca Pena was murdered not far from here, and we know she worked for you because we’ve traced the money from one of her johns to this ridiculous store. You’re in serious trouble, Evelyn, and not because you only sell six T-shirts. I suggest you start talking in complete sentences.”

  “Which client are you referring to?”

  “You tell me.”

  “Francesca Pena worked for me for less than a week. And that was eight months ago. She went by Holly. Holly Gomez.”

  “How many times you send her out?”

  “Three,” says Lee. “One each with three different clients.”

  “Was there a problem?”

  “On the contrary. Holly, apparently, was a natural. All three clients raved—five stars, standing ovation, two thumbs-up. They kept calling, asking for more dates and offering to up their fee, but Holly was in the wind. It cost me a lot of money and made me look like a schmuck.”

  “I need those names.”

  Lee hits a key on her laptop and glances at the screen. “April ninth was a TV news guy named Hank Stubbs. Maybe you’ve heard of him. The other two, on the tenth and eleventh, were just names and credit card numbers.”

  “I need what you have on all three.”

  “I’ll give it to you right now,” says Lee, not making even a feeble attempt to protect the privacy of her clients.

  “I like new Evelyn much better,” says O’Hara as Lee reboots her Mac. “Where you from anyway?”

  “Tenafly.”

  31

  Monday morning, while Daniel Delfinger places his glasses on the corner of his leather-trimmed desk, sticks his head in his wastebasket and loses breakfast, O’Hara takes advantage of the unobstructed view of the back wall to learn what she can about the forty-three-year-old tax attorney and youngest partner of Kane, Lubell, Falco and Ritter. Behind wood and glass frames are a law degree from Harvard and a citation for making Law Review, a picture of his wife and three very young children in front of a looming suburban McMansion, and a sequence of photos of Delfinger and three old friends taken annually over some twenty-five years in the same spot in a Coney Island playground. Over the years, Delfinger morphs from a conspicuously overweight teen to a slim, nearly attractive adult, the only trace of his adolescent weight problem the chubbiness in his boyish cheeks.

  The concise message, carefully laid out for easy absorption, is here is a kid from the neighborhood who worked hard and made good, yet hasn’t forgotten where he came from. O’Hara’s take is less generous: here is one more hypocrite and pig with more money than taste. But she does give him a couple of points for Coney Island and hanging on to old friends. “You going to be all right?” asks O’Hara.

  “You tell me,” says Delfinger, his voice echoing in the chrome receptacle and male-pattern baldness shining through his Jewfro. When he stops puking long enough for O’Hara to show him a picture of Pena, Delfinger readily concedes the tryst, which he says was arranged through Aphrodite eight months before. “It was April eleventh. I remember because it was the day my partners and I settled a large malpractice suit. But she didn’t use Francesca. It was less ethnic, Maggie or Molly.”

  “How about Holly?”

  “Could be.”

  “You didn’t want another date?”

  “No.”

  “Daniel?”

  “Fine, I tried to arrange another. Several times. But she was gone, quit the business, whatever. Hard as it may be to believe, I moved on.”

  “Where were you the night before Thanksgiving?”

  “Home.”

  “In that?” asks O’Hara, pointing to the wall.

  “In Stamford, Connecticut. Our office closed early. I got home about two and was there all weekend.”

  “Can anyone verify that?”

  “About twenty people. Wednesday till Saturday we had my wife’s parents, her two sisters, their husbands and their seven kids.”

  “That’s thirteen.”

  “Eighteen including us.”

  “Your wife will confirm that?”

  “Depends how you ask. Be nice if you could do it in a way that doesn’t ruin my life. I got the number for Aphrodite out of the back of New York magazine. How illegal is that?”

  “I wouldn’t worry. Wives in big houses have a way of getting over stuff.”

  “Naomi hasn’t gotten over anything in five years,” says Delfinger, staring back down at the wastebasket like he’s about to pay it another visit.

  “Nothing else proves you were home?”

  “My secretary has my calendar. It shows the last hour I billed Wednesday and my first one Monday.”

  “You got to do better than that.”

  “I should have an on-line E-ZPass statement, if I haven’t tossed it already.”

  No pun intended, thinks O’Hara. “Let’s see it.”

  Still green, Delfinger finds his November statement among his recently deleted mail and prints it out. O’Hara sees that Delfinger enters and exits Manhattan through the same West Side toll plaza as O’Hara. Southbound, he always clocks in close to 7:00 a.m., and northbound never before 6:00 or after 8:00, except on Friday when it’s never later than 4:00 p.m. Wednesday, he headed home at 1:20 p.m., and the next hit on his account is the following Monday at 6:58 a.m.

  “Let me ask you something,” says O’Hara, nodding at the wall. “Why are you working here? No offense, but this place doesn’t look like Harvard Law School.”

  “That’s what I like about it. At the white-glove firms, I’d be the designated Jew. Or even worse, have to act like I wasn’t one at all—join a country club, pretend my parents are from Connecticut. I came here instead, work with people I actually like and made partner in six years.”

  “Not to mention a shitload of money.”

  “I’m well compensated.” Delfinger may be a scumbag, but based on the rank smell seeping out of his wastebasket, O’Hara can’t believe he has the stomach to torture someone to death. Besides, everything he told her matches with what she’s already heard from Stubbs and Lee. “Take some of that money and buy your wife something very very expensive,” suggests O’Hara, and when she slips the statement in her coat and pushes away from the desk, Delfinger is so grateful she hasn’t called his wife, he looks like he could cry. Instead, he opens a small lacquer box and hands her his card. “Ever need help on your taxes, it’s on me.”

  32

  The picture O’Hara drops on Juergen Muster’s gray enamel worktable draws a blank but not a denial. “Aphrodite is far and away my favorite service in the city,” he says, running his long fingers through his short professionally tousled light brown hair. “Evelyn sends me three or four girls a week, and usually they do me right here in this office. It clears my mind, helps me concentrate.”

  Wonderful, thinks O’Hara.

  And then raising his voice to throw it over a translucent partition just behind him, Muster says, “Isn’t that so, Christina?”

  Last night, when O’Hara Googled Muster, his name popped up all over the place: perfume bottles, nightclub VIP rooms, magazine makeovers, even that topless Kate Moss billboard for Calvin Klein looking down over Lafayette and Houston. One gushing profile dubbed him downtown’s most inspired design polymath. More like Polly wants a hooker, thinks O’Hara, which is surprising in a way, since Muster, long and angular, as if he sketched himself, with chiseled features covered with three days of silvery stubble, is certainly att
ractive enough not to have to pay for female attention.

  “Try concentrating on this,” says O’Hara, pointing at the picture. Other than the picture, the only item on Muster’s pristine oblong table is a sketch pad open to a blank page. When O’Hara slides the photo toward him, Muster’s pale green eyes follow its progress like a spreading stain.

  “Lee said you called her repeatedly. Said you practically begged for a second date.”

  “Holly,” says Muster. “Yes, of course. The picture doesn’t do her justice.”

  “How’d you feel when Lee couldn’t contact her?”

  “Chagrined,” says Muster, whose beautifully cut gray suit makes it hard to tell where his desk ends and he begins. “One thing about having sex with pros, as opposed to quote unquote amateurs, is that I generally get to decide when the relationship is over. Getting dumped by a call girl is quite deflating.”

  “Your feelings were hurt?”

  “Something like that. But I didn’t fly into a murderous rage. And if you check with Evelyn, you’ll find I’ve been on many other satisfactory dates since.”

  Delfinger’s office was a photo album. Muster’s Tribeca loft is uncluttered by evidence of anything as corny as a family or a past, and every detail is pared to within an inch of its life. How disappointed Muster would be, thinks O’Hara, if he knew that when it came to women, he had the identical taste as a slimmed-down striver from Brooklyn, who buys his suits off the rack and drives home to the suburbs every night. Men spend their whole lives propping up a personality a millimeter thick.

  “Where were you at four a.m. Thanksgiving morning? And please, for their sake, don’t tell me with your family.”